Is Fox News Good for America? An Investigation Continues...

OWNING IT /// Ailes in September 2006, ten years after telling Rupert Murdoch, as he remembers, "I can beat CNN because CNN has never had any competition and won't know what to do. And MSNBC will ignore me, because they're arrogant. And if they ignore me for two years, I'll destroy them."

I guess you would expect Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, to say that "Fox News is good for America." After all, he is the first to admit that he cribs from the Roger Ailes playbook — indeed, the first to admit that he sometimes makes his decisions asking the nearly metaphysical question, "What would Roger do?" But there is another reason for his approbation of Fox besides his admiration for the acumen of Roger Ailes. And the reason is this: he, like Ailes, worked for NBC News in the days before the advent of Fox. And he, like Ailes, has based everything he has done with his own news channel on that experience — on the experience of making television at a place where people thought they were above television, and so above people like Phil Griffin and Roger Ailes.

"People don't remember how closed everything was back then," Griffin told Esquire in one of my 30-plus interviews for a new profile in the February issue. "I mean, there was a time when the heads of every single news channel — CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS — sent their sons to the same private school. And there really were voices that they would not allow on television. Not just conservative voices, but voices that they thought were beneath them — vulgar. It was a class thing. And so when Roger wanted to run MSNBC in the mid-nineties there was no way they were going to let him. He was already running this low-rent, 24-hour-talk channel called America's Talking, and they were embarrassed by it. They thought they would just do network news on cable, and they'd have a big hit. Roger, of course, took what he learned at America's Talking, went across the street to Rupert Murdoch, and just demolished them."

It's worth noting that Ailes went across the street intent on demolishing MSNBC — that Ailes, as he told Esquire, assured Murdoch that "MSNBC will ignore me, because they're arrogant. And if they ignore me for two years, I'll destroy them." But it's also worth acknowledging, as we begin to complete our coverage of Roger Ailes here on The Politics Blog — and, as an inevitable consequence, begin debating the question of whether Fox News is good for America — that Roger Ailes was able to crush MSNBC and then finally CNN because television news was closed, and he opened it. There were voices that were excluded from the airwaves, and therefore the debate, and he included them. There was a nonsectarian gentleman's agreement about what constituted "the news" — in terms of both content and style — and he gleefully violated it.

And so, yes, on the one hand, Fox News has been good for America, because it has energized the argument, broadened the sense of what's allowable in the debate, and pushed the American experiment in radical democratization farther along. On the other, Ailes's experiment in free speech has also become an experiment in propaganda, and his attempt to redefine the mainstream has led the mainstream to become radicalized. The voice that never would have been heard without Ailes's intercession has turned out to be the dark and nearly seditious voice of Glenn Beck, and the rhetoric that Ailes unleashed turned out to the charged rhetoric that has itself been the subject of charged debate since Jared Loughner went on a rampage in Arizona. Ailes owns it, and not just because of his success as a provocative programmer; he owns it because it captures his endless sense of personal grievance — a sense of personal grievance that is at the root of, and yet is completely unassuaged by, his success.

Of course, Roger Ailes was one of the first to come forward in the week following the Arizona shootings to say that he had told his anchors at Fox to "tone it down." But anyone who knows Roger Ailes — anyone who loves him, hates him, admires him, fears him, or, as is most often the case, does all those things at once — knows that Fox will do no such thing, because Fox is Roger Ailes, and Roger Ailes is temperamentally unable to tone it down. He's an extremist, by nature, and so his network is one of extremes. It's not so much that he has let the genie out of the bottle; it's that he is the genie, and his bottle makes a billion bucks a year for Rupert Murdoch. You just try getting him back in.

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